Meet the new Shippable

- By Manisha Sahasrabudhe on February 29, 2016

Today, we are proud to announce our latest Shippable release. This release is very close to our hearts for several reasons. First, it addresses almost all customer feedback that we have received over the last couple of years. Second, it achieves our goal of going beyond CI and being a true end-to-end continuous delivery platform for all applications. Third, our platform architecture sets us up to execute faster than anyone else, which means we can innovate at breakneck speed and deliver value to our customers, namely, YOU.

The new Shippable helps you ship code faster than ever before. Let’s delve deeper into what we are launching today.

Integrated deployment pipelines

You can now go beyond CI and set up your deployment pipelines with Shippable. In this release, we’ve added the ability to deploy your applications to Amazon’s ECS and Google Container Engine (GKE). Our pipelines are fully integrated with the existing CI workflows, so you can set up the complete end-to-end workflow where you commit code, which triggers CI, which triggers a new deployment for your application or service.

We have reimagined shippable.yml with two goals in mind. First, it allows almost unlimited flexibility in what you can configure with Shippable. Second, it addresses one of our most common feature requests – Docker workflows are now entirely driven with your yml. You can customize your Docker workflows, including pushing images with multiple tags, building multiple docker images as part of your build and more. You can even spin up your application using Docker compose and run tests against it.

Check out the CI Configure section of our docs for details. Also note that legacy yml files continue to be supported in this release so you don’t have to convert existing projects to the new format.

Faster, predictable builds

We have invested heavily in re-architecting our build system to ensure that your builds are fast and consistent. We have also improved service reliability, so problems with build times being unpredictable are a thing of the past. Your build minions will no longer be affected by time of day, network bandwidth, or noisy neighbors.

Updated build images

We have updated build images for all languages with the latest language versions and services. Your builds will use these new images for all projects enabled after today. If you want to use a new image for an existing project, read this overview to get started.

All new images are in our drydock repository on Docker Hub. We will update images every quarter moving forward, so you’ll never have to wait for new language and service versions.

Improved caching

Your cache will now be updated after every build. Caching is available in two flavors – you can choose to cache at the end of your build, or you can cache at any specific point in your build. Here is guidance that explains how to use both types of caching.

Ability to run builds on your own infrastructure

You can use your own build nodes for builds, which can be behind a firewall or in your VPC, to run your builds. Customers like Packet.net have seen an 8X improvement in build times by using their dedicated infrastructure. This means you get all the benefits of a SaaS orchestration, but with the security of an on premise platform. You can also use bigger minions if you want more build horsepower! Read our docs to get the whole scoop.

Improved support resources

In tandem with this release, we are also doubling down on our support infrastructure and resourcing to improve responsiveness to customer questions and requests. Visit our support site to submit issues and browse solutions to issues raised by other developers.

We will kick off a series of blogs to explain each of these in more detail, along with a bunch of tutorials that will help you get started.